Before the Devil Breaks You

by Libba Bray

  “All right,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I am not supposed to be telling you this, so you have to promise to take it to your grave!”

  Evie mimed crossing her heart. “And hope to die.”

  Satisfied, Mabel leaned forward. “I am a member of the Secret Six,” she said at last, craning her neck to be sure she wasn’t overheard.

  Evie looked perplexed. “Is that a dance troupe? Tell me you haven’t taken up mime! Because I could certainly understand not wanting anyone to know about that.”

  “The Secret Six!” Mabel said with more energy. When Evie still looked blank, Mabel groaned. “We’re rebels? Revolutionaries? Honestly, don’t you ever read anything besides the gossip pages? We’ve been in all the papers!”

  As it came to Evie, her teasing smile faded. “Wait a minute. The Secret Six. Didn’t they dynamite a factory somewhere? Mabel… aren’t they anarchists?”

  Mabel sat up very straight. “So what if we are? This world needs a bit of shaking up. And anyway, the Six have never hurt anyone—not like the Pinkertons, the capitalists, and the government. We fight for the worker.”

  “Fight for the worker how, though? Mabesie…” Evie paused, unsure of what to say. She didn’t want to make Mabel mad. “You’re not doing anything foolish, are you?”

  Mabel leaned back against the booth. “You have some nerve. What about you? What about your… ghost removal policy.”

  Evie rolled her eyes. “It’s hardly a policy.”

  “That isn’t the point.”

  “We’re trying to find Conor and keep our country safe, I’ll remind you.”

  “At what cost?” Mabel asked. “I’m not sure that what you’re doing is right.”

  “I see. Are you becoming a champion of ghosts’ rights now?” Evie snapped, and immediately regretted it. Mabel went quiet. “I’m sorry, Pie Face. I just don’t want you to get hurt!”

  Mabel responded with cold fury. “You know who’s getting hurt? Workers. Poor people. Immigrants. Every day. It’s a rigged game, Evie. The people at the top say they believe in the people at the bottom until those people try to climb up. And then the people at the top step on the hands of the climbing people they claim to believe in and cast them down the ladder.”

  “I’m sorry for what I said. Truly I am.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Evie chewed softly on her bottom lip. “What about your parents?”

  “They don’t know,” Mabel admitted. “Oh, look, I love Mama and Papa, but they’re so old-fashioned! They only let me hand out pamphlets and carry picket signs. I want to be in the fight! I want to get my hands dirty!”

  “Mabel Rose for president!” Evie said, punching the air with her index finger. She took Mabel’s hands in hers. “You’re the best person I know, Mabel Rose. If you vouch for Arthur Brown and the Secret Six, they must be jake.”

  Mabel blushed. “I’m not the best person.”

  “You are, so! You’re good and kind, and you want to make the world better.”

  Evie kissed Mabel’s cheek, and Mabel rested her forehead against Evie’s. It felt good to be close friends again, to trust Evie with her secrets. It had never occurred to Mabel before to ask Evie to read something of Arthur’s, but now that the idea was in her head, it wouldn’t leave. He was awfully secretive. What if he had a sweetheart somewhere? What if Mabel could know more about the wounds of his past and make them better? She was good at fixing broken things, and it would be so easy to know.…

  “I do have something of Arthur’s,” Mabel blurted out, hating herself a little for it. “Not that I’m saying you should read it.”

  Evie smirked. “You’re not telling me not to read it, either.”

  Mabel reached into her pocket and pulled out Arthur’s card, the one he’d given her the day they’d met. “I really shouldn’t.”

  Reluctantly, she handed it to Evie, who held it up to her forehead like a soothsayer. “What mysterious mysteries will be revealed tonight on… the Sweetheart Seer!”

  “Oh, this is a terrible idea! Forget I said anything!” Mabel snatched the card back, tapping her fingers against it on the table.

  Miss Addie wandered through and the girls watched her, dribbling salt from the pockets of her dress, mumbling something about “Keep Elijah in his grave.”

  “Same bad cocoa. Same spooky Adelaide,” Evie said. She downed the last of her drink. “Come on. I want to go see this Maria Provenza.”

  While Mabel was distracted with gathering her belongings, Evie pocketed Arthur’s card.

  By the time Evie and Mabel arrived on Carmine Street, it was dusk. Street lamps cast a sickly glow down the block.

  “This is it,” Mabel said, hopping up the steps to Maria’s building and knocking at the door. An older man answered. He squinted suspiciously at Evie and Mabel. “There’s no booze here. This is not a speakeasy.”

  “I’m looking for Maria Provenza? She lives in Four-L,” Mabel explained, and smiled, hoping it would make them seem like trustworthy souls, but it only made the man scowl harder.

  “Those people? They’re gone, and good riddance.” He spat over the railing.

  “What… what do you mean, gone?” Mabel sputtered.

  “Deported,” the man said slowly.

  “For what?” Evie asked.

  “Treason, that’s what! Galleanists, the whole bunch of ’em. The police found all sorts of anarchist papers—seditious materials—up there in that dump they were all packed into. Foreigners. Send ’em all back, I say.” He pointed a finger at the girls. “You girls oughta steer clear of that nonsense. Go home to your families.”

  He disappeared inside, slamming the door in their faces.

  “But I was there. That’s not true. They had no seditious papers,” Mabel said numbly to Evie as they walked arm in arm back up the mostly deserted Carmine Street. “They were people just trying to get by, selling paper roses on the streets. Someone wanted them gone.”

  “The Shadow Men,” Evie said, and Mabel nodded.

  Night was coming down hard now. Evie shivered. “Remember when we were just scared of getting pinched by the cops for getting blotto at the Hotsy Totsy?”

  “Or being lectured by my mother for sneaking out my window?”

  “Mabel, daahrling, I did not raise you to behave like a common hoooligan!” Evie said in her best impression of Mabel’s mother. They shared a giggle, but it was short-lived. “Sometimes, I wish we were girls again, safe.”

  Mabel snorted in contempt. “When has it ever been safe to be a girl?”

  The train rumbled over the tracks above Sixth Avenue.

  “I have to meet up with Arthur,” Mabel said.

  “Can’t I tag along? I want to meet this mysterious Arthur Brown!”

  “Sorry. I can’t. Rules. You’re not even supposed to know. Remember?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t stay. I just want to lay eyes on the revolutionary specimen.” Evie wiggled her eyebrows and giggled.

  “I’d better not. He might get upset,” Mabel said.

  Evie sobered. “Well, that doesn’t sound kosher, as your father would say.”

  Immediately, Mabel got defensive. “You don’t know him like I do. He’s got his reasons to be careful.”

  Evie knew Mabel. She knew that telling Mabel not to do something was as good as pushing her toward it. She was stubborn that way—and too much of a romantic. No doubt she’d see Arthur as a wounded boy who needed her love to become a healed man. Sewn into Mabel’s goodness was a twin thread of grandiosity: Saving people gave Mabel the feeling that she was special for doing so. It was Mabel’s drug, and she was very addicted. Not that Evie cared if that was Mabel’s blind spot. After all, everybody had something about them that could be lovely on the one hand and annoying as hell on the other. And anyway, it was clear that there was no arguing it tonight.

  Evie threw her hands in the air in defeat. “All right. I can’t fight the great reformer Mabel Rose.” She kissed Mabel’s
cheek. “Fare thee well, sweet Pie Face.”

  Mabel waved good-bye and turned up Bleecker Street.

  “Mabesie!” Evie called.

  Mabel turned back. Under the glow of the street lamp, she looked like a sweet-faced angel. “Yes?”

  “Be careful, please? No, don’t you dare make that annoyed face! I adore you. The truth is, I’d be lost without you.”

  “Yes. You would.” Mabel laughed. “I love you, too.”

  Mabel continued on her way. She did love Evie. And she felt guilty for not inviting her along, especially when Evie had been standing there in the cold. With those wisps of her bobbed hair sticking out crosswise around the sides of her fashionable cloche, she’d looked less like Evie O’Neill, Sweetheart Seer radio star, and more like Evie, her best friend, and Mabel was hit by a pang for the times Evie had just mentioned, when they were writing letters to each other about film stars they swooned over and how delicious milk shakes were.

  Yes, it was true that the Six was a secret. But the deeper truth was that as much as she loved Evie, Mabel didn’t want to invite her. She didn’t want to watch Evie suck up all the attention. This was Mabel’s place to shine, and she didn’t want to compete with Evie’s bright glow.

  This business with Maria Provenza had her worried, though. Somebody had planted those papers, Mabel felt sure. Arthur would say you never really knew people, but Mabel’s gut told her that she did know that Maria Provenza wasn’t an anarchist; she was just a woman worried about her missing sister. And if the Shadow Men really had taken Anna Provenza, then where were they keeping her—and why?

  Mabel thought again about Anna’s vision and the warning from the Diviner at the camp. They’d both said that danger was coming. That Mabel should be careful. Arthur would say she shouldn’t believe in Diviner warnings. Evie would put all her faith in them. And there was Mabel, caught in the middle. Mabel’s whole existence was about belief in causes and change. But for once, she didn’t know what to believe.

  The coffee shop’s windows blazed into the night. Arthur sat inside at a table. Mabel stopped to check her breath and fix her hair. In the glass, she thought she saw the reflection of the burly man. She whirled around, searching the shadows across the street, but it was just an ordinary man on his way to wherever he was going, and so she went inside.

  Evie knocked at Henry and Theta’s door.

  “To what do I owe this great honor?” Sam asked, arms folded.

  “Oh, clam up, will you? I’m worried about Mabel.”

  Sam welcomed Evie inside, and she plopped herself down on Theta and Henry’s one decent chair.

  “Mabel? Mabel’s probably the one person you don’t need to worry about,” Sam said, bringing over two Hires root beers and taking a seat in the smaller, rickety chair. “She’s got her head on straight. Why, I’ll bet she’s downstairs right now making up a box for the poor.”

  “No, she’s not, either. She’s out with a boy.”

  “Well, bully for her!”

  “I’m not so sure. This boy might be trouble.”

  Sam smirked. “You want me to go steal his wallet, tell him he can’t have it back until he promises to be a prince to Mabel?”

  Evie managed a brief smile. “No. At least, not yet.”

  “Aww, listen, Sheba. Mabel’s a good egg. She wouldn’t go for any funny business.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Sam took a swig of his root beer. “But speaking of funny—something funny happened to me today.”

  Evie scrounged in her purse for her compact and checked her complexion in its small round mirror. “Funny haha or funny strange?”

  “I had the feeling I was being followed.”

  “By whom? Adoring packs of schoolgirls?” When Sam didn’t answer, she asked, “Was it adoring packs of schoolgirls?”

  “You finished?”

  “Since I didn’t get a laugh, I suppose I am,” Evie said, and powdered her nose.

  Sam took another swig of his root beer and wiped his hand across his mouth. “I didn’t see anybody when I turned around. I just had this… hunch. That weird feeling in my gut.”

  “Who would want to follow you?”

  Sam quirked an eyebrow. “You want me to make a list?”

  Evie closed her compact with a snap. “No, thanks. I hate to see you have to work so hard. I know what a toll thinking takes on you.”

  Sam shot her an annoyed look. “Okay. Then how about this: Maybe the people who have my mother. Maybe those creepy Shadow Men.”

  Now Evie was worried about both Mabel and Sam. “Funny you should mention our elusive friends the Shadow Men,” Evie said, and she told Sam about the encounter she and Mabel had just had with Maria Provenza’s bigoted landlord.

  Sam listened with a grave expression. “Something sure stinks, all right.”

  “Sam, I don’t think you should go anywhere by yourself.”

  His grin was wolfish. “Yeah? You offering to be my bodyguard, Lamb Chop? Gee, that’ll be kinda awkward on my dates, won’t it?”

  Evie rolled her eyes. “Fine. Get pinched by those creepy Shadow Men. See if I care.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Baby Vamp. I’m a street rat. Been looking after myself for a long time,” Sam said, finishing his root beer. “Still—it’s all the more reason to know what’s on those cards, see if we can find other Diviners who might hold more pieces of the puzzle. Have you heard anything from the giant up in Valhalla, yet?”

  “Frequently. And once he called me long-distance!” Evie said breezily. Two can play at this game, Sam. “But so far, he still hasn’t found your card reader.”

  “Well, maybe you can give him a noodge?”

  “A what?”

  “A noodge. A little prodding,” Sam explained. “I’m getting antsy here.”

  “Fine. I’ll send him an urgent letter.” At the door, she wrinkled her nose. “Noodge? Is that a real word?”

  “It’s Yiddish. Like…Ikh hob dikh lib.”

  Evie narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “What does that mean?”

  Sam smiled. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you.”

  When Evie got back to the Winthrop, she took Arthur’s card from her pocket and placed it on the table, debating. She knew she shouldn’t read it, but Mabel had been so secretive that it had piqued her curiosity.

  “I really shouldn’t,” Evie said aloud. And then she was frantically pulling off her gloves and pressing Arthur’s card between her palms.

  A memory of Arthur and Mabel’s first meeting flared. He’d rescued her from the police at a rally in Union Square. Their chance meeting was sweet. She saw Mabel’s face as Arthur had then, all curly copper hair and big eyes. Evie could feel the kernel of attraction between them. She should stop, she knew. She would stop. As soon as she knew if her best friend was okay. But then the card took a turn. Evie felt fear and danger and deception. She saw Arthur in a cell. A man in a brown hat sat across from him. Evie caught the flash of a badge. Police? No. Bigger than that. “It’s your choice, Mr. Brown.”

  Arthur scoffed. “Choice. Ha.”

  “Just do what we say. We’ll take it from there,” the brown-hat man said.

  Evie had no idea what that meant. She pressed further, but the card wasn’t giving her anything else, and now she was sorry she’d read it. Objects had a voice, and this one was screaming at her. Should she confess to Mabel what she’d done? Mabel would probably never speak to her again. Should she say something to Mabel’s parents? Only a snitch would do that, and Evie was no snitch. Besides, Mabel’s mother hated Evie.

  Evie did know one thing for certain: Arthur Brown was in some sort of trouble. Bad trouble.

  “Oh, Mabesie. What have you gotten yourself into?” she whispered.

  That night, the Diviners atomized a family at an abandoned house in Queens.

  The neighbors had called it in—disturbances, rattling, pets gone missing. The old house’s dining room still had paper on the walls, a delicate lily-of-the-valle
y pattern that must have been pretty once, before the dirt and decay set in. The ghostly family—a husband, his wife, and pinafored twin girls who couldn’t have been more than seven—sat at the table as if they were merely waiting for their supper. Sam and Memphis had barraged them with questions, but the man and his wife only seemed confused and a little afraid.

  “We don’t know,” the woman said, her voice sounding as if it were coming through a tin can. “We don’t know why we’re here. It was a carriage accident, you see. A carriage accident.”

  Memphis could see the line across the husband’s abdomen where he’d been crushed. Here and then gone.

  “They’re lying,” Evie said to the others. “They have to know something! It’s a trick.”

  “What if they’re not lying?” Ling asked. “Henry?”

  “Gee. I don’t know,” Henry said, glancing from face to face.

  “It was a carriage accident,” the ghost wife insisted. “I saw the horses sliding sideways. Then we tumbled down the hillside. Gone, all gone in the blink of an eye.”

  “We should do it quick, before they turn,” Sam said.

  The father put a hand to his wound. “We were to see my brother in the country.”

  “Maybe they’re not going to turn,” Ling said. She couldn’t stop looking at the twin girls, who clung to each other. They were frightened. Of her.

  “Where is Conor Flynn?” Memphis asked.

  “A carriage accident, I tell you,” the ghost wife pleaded. “That’s all. I don’t know why we’re here.”

  “Ready?” Sam prompted.

  “Yeah. Okay,” Memphis grumbled. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the family. He was glad Isaiah wasn’t there.

  “Why are we here? Why? Why…?” the woman cried as the Diviners came together and blasted them apart.

  No one spoke on the long walk back to the train.